Minimal Differentiation in the College Rankings Market

Transcription

1 Minimal Differentiation in the College Rankings Market Audrey Tiew Advisor: Professor Jun Ishii April 30, 2014 Submitted to the Department of Economics of Amherst College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelors of Arts with honors

2 Abstract College rankings have become an important source of information in the college admissions market. As the number of first-generation college students, the number of applications per student, and the geographic range of applications increased, rankings emerged as a means of navigating the complex college choice process. While previous literature studies the influence of college rankings on college and student decisions, it treats college rankings themselves as static and given. My thesis models product choice by college rankings firms. I extend the Hotelling model of horizontal product differentiation to allow for differences in consumers willingness to pay and interactions in a two-sided market with advertisers and consumers. The model illustrates how a rise in the importance of advertising may help explain the observed decrease in the prices of and differentiation among rankings offered in the market. It also shows that increased advertising generates two opposing changes in total welfare. On one hand, increased advertising increases welfare by expanding access to rankings through lower prices. On the other hand, it may also decrease welfare by causing some consumers to lose access to their preferred product. Through these two opposing changes, advertising both aids and hinders the search for the right college. i

3 Acknowledgments Thank you to all the people in the economics department who have helped me along the way. Thank you Prof. Ishii for always challenging me to do better, helping me make this thesis a reality, and inspiring me. Since I took Intro to Econ with him my freshman year, I have learnt an incredible amount not only about economics but also about life. Thank you Prof. Nicholson who kindly took me on as a research assistant even though he was retiring, always encouraged me to ask questions, and gave me my first real taste of research. Thank you Prof. Kingston for exposing me to game theory and the wonderful worlds of new institutional economics and political economics. I enjoyed your classes immensely. Thank you Prof. Reyes for teaching a great honors seminar and encouraging me to step out of my comfort zone. Thank you Prof. Westhoff for the humor and steady encouragement. Thank you Jeanne for always being a friendly face and cheering me up. Thank you to all my fellow thesis writers for taking this journey with me. Thank you to all my wonderful friends. Sunny, Alex, Phyo, Shanghui, Sarah, and Xiaoling for supporting and putting up with me along the way. Katrin, thank you for being there for me when I needed you. Thank you to Sensei, Tracy, and fellow Karate-ka for being my family away from home. This last semester has been an especially tough one for me, thank you for helping me get by. Last but certainly not least, thank you to my parents who were always there for me even when all I could do was cry on the phone. Thank you mom and dad for giving me the chance to come to Amherst College and see what I could accomplish. ii

5 1 Introduction Every year, over two million high school graduates go to college. To make sure they end up at the right school, they spend several hundred million dollars on the admissions process...this book is your best bet Princeton Review Student Access Guide to the Best Colleges From 1976 to 2010, the number of students enrolled in undergraduate institutions in the U.S. increased from 9.42 million to million ( Total Fall Enrollment, 2011). Many of these new applicants were minority and/or low-income students less informed about the admissions process and college market (Hossler et al., 2004). These applications also spanned a wider geographic range of colleges than in previous years (Hoxby, 1996). In 1989, only 16% of students applied to six or more colleges. In 2009, 33% applied to six or more institutions (Hoover, 2010). This widening in scope made determining to which colleges to apply more difficult. In response to this increase in demand for information, college rankings firms emerged as experts capable of providing comparisons of hundreds of colleges nationwide to students. Rankings supply information to students faced with the uncertain decision of which colleges to apply and ultimately attend. The rise in demand for college ranking products has spurred an economics literature studying rankings. This literature focuses primarily on how rankings have altered the behaviors of students and colleges. In particular, it debates whether rankings facilitate efficiency or encourage wasteful behavior. However, this research treats college rankings themselves as static and given. While considering the strategies of students and colleges, they do not consider the strategies of the rankings firms themselves. 1 My thesis endogenizes the rankings product. I argue that, with increased advertising demand, incumbent rankings firms offer similar products to maximize profit. 1 See, e.g. (Bastedow & Bowman, 2008, 2009, 2010a, 2010b; Ehrenberg & Monks, 1999; Griffith & Rask, 2005; Jin & Whalley, 2007; Meredith, 2004) and the papers cited there. 1

6 Advertising also encourages new entrants to enter with similar products. Consequently, with advertising, engaging in price-competition may be consistent with profitmaximization in an oligopoly, as offering consumers free rankings may allow for higher profits from advertisers. However, the market with advertising may still be inefficient from the perspective of a utilitarian social planner. The structure of the rankings market makes these outcomes possible. Since rankings are information goods, product differentiation emerges as rankings firms most viable escape from price competition, i.e. Bertrand s paradox. Escaping Bertrand s paradox is especially important to rankings firms because information goods typically have high fixed costs and low marginal costs. Charging price equal to marginal cost may be insufficient to recoup fixed costs (Arrow, 1962, p.614). Arrow (1962) points out that rankings also have a low marginal cost of redistribution. This makes consumers of information goods potential competitors. Consequently, product differentiation remains as one of the viable traditional escapes from price competition. The ability of consumers to reproduce and redistribute rankings renders capacity constraints difficult to maintain, as consumers can easily produce more rankings. Since the number of firms in the market potentially equals the number of consumers, collusion is also unsustainable. Thus, the remaining escape is for firms to produce differentiated goods. In addition to product differentiation, two-sided markets may allow firms to earn positive profits. In a two-sided market, rankings firms sell rankings to consumers and advertising space in the rankings to advertisers. While it may be easy for consumers to enter the rankings side of the market, they encounter entry barriers to selling to advertisers. This occurs because advertisers value the number of viewers a rankings firm reaches. 2 Incumbents already have a large, established viewer base. Consumers, as new entrants, have few viewers. As such, their advertising space is not attractive 2 As I discuss later, these viewers could be a specific type of viewer. 2

7 to advertisers. The tradeoff between product differentiation and advertising emerges when advertisers are interested in targeting a particular type of consumer. This makes it difficult for firms to benefit from product differentiation and two-sided markets at the same time. Product differentiation is effective when different consumers have different tastes for a given product. However, if advertisers are interested in only one type of consumer, then it is only beneficial for them to buy advertising space from the firm(s) whose product(s) reach that type of consumer. Thus, rankings firms must choose between commonly appealing to advertisers target consumers or providing differentiated rankings appealing to different consumer types. This approach to college rankings fits with a broader literature on what Gal- Or and Dukes (2003) call the principle of minimal differentiation. The principle of minimal differentiation states that firms may produce undifferentiated products in equilibrium. This literature explores how minimal differentiation occurs in the presence of advertising. However, it focuses on the impacts of advertising on the provision of public goods through radio and television. 3 Assuming media as free to consumers, the literature centers on how advertising prices are set. 4 My thesis extends this literature s insights on minimal differentiation to the provision of private goods in the college rankings market. Demand for advertising in college rankings was likely small when U.S. News and World Report (USNWR) first released its rankings in USNWR sold advertising only to State Farm Insurance until In 2002, it sold advertising only to AIG. 3 See, e.g. (Steiner, 1952; Owen, 1977; Gabszewicz, 2001; Beebe, 1977; Gal-Or & Dukes, 2003; Coate, 2005), and the papers cited there. 4 Coate (2005) briefly explores the consequences of allowing media firms to charge households positive prices. However, Coate models how the addition of positive consumer prices changes a market that originally profited only from advertising. I would like to look at the reverse, how the addition of advertising changes a market that had positive consumer prices. Coate finds that, given the option, media firms will charge households positive prices. My model demonstrates that the introduction of advertising may lead to zero household prices. 3

8 Within the rankings book, these advertisements filled roughly eight full, color pages. This suggests that USNWR had plenty of advertising capacity but few advertisers demanding space. Moreover, when the Princeton Review (PR) first released its rankings in 1992 it did not sell any advertising space. When advertising demand was low, the firms in the market, USNWR, PR, and Money Magazine, produced rankings that served different needs and appealed to different types of consumers. USNWR appealed to parents with more general information about college life. PR targeted students by ranking based on student perspectives of colleges. Neither explicitly ranked using the value and outputs of a college education. Money Magazine uniquely catered to those interested in value, ranking best buy colleges. After 2000, there is evidence that demand for advertising increased greatly. US- NWR started selling advertising space to multiple firms. It also divided the many pages once allotted to a single advertiser among ten or so different advertisers. PR added a section at the end of its book dedicated to advertising. This suggests a rise in advertising demand, as USNWR could now sell smaller, less preferable advertising spaces to more advertisers, and PR could begin selling advertising space. Furthermore, this new demand was to reach financially-conscious consumers. The majority of advertisers were financial service firms looking to promote credit and loan services. Advertisements not explicitly for financial services also appear to target financiallyconscious viewers; they include ads for community colleges, job search engines, and discount shopping. This increase in advertising demand changed the rankings market in two ways. First, it decreased the degree of differentiation among rankings. Whereas they previously catered to those interested in college life, both USNWR and PR began ranking with a greater emphasis on value in terms of the cost of attending an institution and an institution s impact on output or future earnings. Second, it increased the 4

9 number of entrants into the rankings market who provided value-oriented rankings. Many other firms such as Forbes, Wall Street Journal (WSJ), and Kiplinger have also begun releasing rankings that emphasize the value or outputs with which colleges provide their students (Kaminer, 2013). Increased advertising demand decreased differentiation and increased entry because advertising acts as a subsidy to rankings firms. When advertisers prefer to reach one type of consumer, advertising revenue effectively subsidizes only one type of ranking. In turn, this encourages firms to create rankings serving that consumer type. Moreover, increased advertising demand increases profits from selling rankings, encouraging entry. While some of the availability of value-oriented rankings is due to consumer demand, as there would be no eyeballs for advertisers to reach without it, this advertising subsidy may lead more firms to produce value-oriented rankings ceteris paribus. To demonstrate how advertising decreases differentiation in the college rankings market, my thesis models firm product choice in an oligopoly using a variant of the Hotelling model. There are two firms and two types of consumers defined by different preferences. Firms choose which rankings to sell and what price to charge for rankings. Demand functions for each firm are derived assuming consumer utility maximization. Household and advertising markets are separate. I treat the price of advertising space as exogenous. This is because rankings firms are price-setters in the rankings market but price-takers in the advertising market. A limited number of firms producing college rankings, but many firms sell advertising. Thus, rankings firms make some additional revenue from advertising for each ranking sold to the advertisers preferred consumer type. The amount of this additional revenue increases with advertising demand. The model shows that two symmetric firms who act simultaneously will segment the market by choosing differentiated rankings and charging high consumer prices 5

10 when advertising demand is low. With the introduction of sufficient advertising, firms produce the same rankings and charge consumers zero prices. Furthermore, it demonstrates that advertising increases welfare by increasing consumer access to rankings but still leads to an inefficient provision of rankings. Subsequently, I extend the model to illustrate how advertising affects entry into the college rankings market. I consider three firms that decide whether to enter the market and, if so, what rankings to offer sequentially. This extension demonstrates how increased advertising demand may induce more firms to enter and produce the same product. In terms of welfare, entry induced by advertising improves welfare as it expands consumer access to goods. However, at high levels of advertising, the provision of goods is also inefficient. 2 Rankings Industry Background Since 1983 when USNWR started offering college rankings, the cost of attending college has been a concern for many families. However, during this time, there have been major changes in both the rankings available and the advertisements appearing in the college rankings product. Rankings content has become more similar, and more firms have begun offering rankings. Advertising demand has gone from playing aminorroletoaprominentone.mythesisarguesthesechangesarerelated. 2.1 Rankings 1983 to 2000 Prior to 2000, the rising cost of college was already a concern for the families of college-bound students. Across private (nonprofit) four-year, public four-year, and public two-year institutions, the average annual percentage increases in inflationadjusted published tuition were 4.1%, 4.3%, and 5%, respectively, for the three types of institutions in the 1980s ( Average Rates, 2014). 6

11 Before 2000, there were few firms in the rankings market, and these firms provided clearly differentiated rankings. (See Figure 1). These firms included USNWR, PR, and Money Magazine. USNWR emphasized objective data and college administration feedback that appealed to parents. It printed articles directed at parents such as A Counselor s Tips to Parents in the News You Can Use About College section of USNWR s 1989 edition, which offer[ed] anxious parents advice on how to relieve rather than add to the stress involved in helping their children get into college (39). PR emphasized student feedback that would appeal more to prospective students. In particular, PR titled their product Student Access Guide to Best Colleges, and addressed students directly with questions such as, Do you qualify? Find out how competitive each school really is (1992). Contrary to USNWR and PR, Money Magazine uniquely focused on measuring the affordability and bottom line of a college education in its rankings. Absent from USNWR s rankings criteria is an emphasis on affordability and value. US- NWR initially based its rankings off of a survey sent to college presidents asking them to pick the five best undergraduate institutions similar to their own based on quality of academic courses, professors, student bodies and general atmosphere of learning provided. In 1988, this was changed to include, in order of importance, the school s selectivity; the strength of a school s faculty and its instructional budget per student; the resources available for its educational programs; a college s ability to see its entering students through graduation. Similarly, of the approximately 63 separate lists of colleges PR provides detailing different aspects of student life, not one emphasized value or output. Initially, there was little advertising in the college rankings market. USNWR sold advertising only to State Farm Insurance, which sponsored the college rankings provided by USNWR in exchange for almost ten full pages of advertising space. USNWR s parent-oriented content also aligned with the wishes of its State Farm 7

12 Figure 1: College Rankings Market 1983 to 2000 sponsor. Selling life insurance, State Farm used its advertising pages to appeal to parents to buy life insurance such that their children would be guaranteed a quality education. PR did not sell advertising space. Moreover, reflecting the small role of advertising, rankings were provided at a cost to households. Through the 1990s, USNWR charged about $ PR charged between $ and $ to households (Princeton Review, 1992, 1994, 2000, 2014) to Present The rising cost of college continued to be a concern after the turn of millennium. Across private (nonprofit) four-year, public four-year, and public two-year institutions, the average annual percentage increases in inflation-adjusted published prices were 2.3%, 4.2%, and 3%, respectively in the 2000s ( Average Rates, 2014). These 8

13 percentages are similar to those before Furthermore, after 2000, the rankings offered became more similar, and many more firms entered the rankings market. (See Figure 2). New entrants included Forbes, Washington Monthly, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Kiplinger, and Payscale. Incumbents and entrants emphasized value and outputs as a criteria in their rankings (Kaminer, 2013). USNWR s rankings now emphasize output measures such as graduation rates and graduation rate performance. Whereas graduation statistics were at the bottom of USNWR s list of rankings criteria prior to 2000, they are now at the top, accounting for 30% of USNWR s rankings data ( Frequently Asked Questions, 2013). USNWR also now publishes its own best value list. Similarly, PR s collection of lists now includes a Best Value list longer and more prominently located than those about student life. Moreover, lists detailing elements of student social life such as Students hang out in big groups and Aesthete schools have been dropped in favor of lists such as Best Career Services and lists about Best facilities (1994, 2014). Entrants similarly focus on the value and output of a college education. Echoing USNWR, Forbes promotes its focus on output over input, and emphasizes that rankings matter because college is a large investment (Howard, 2013). The Washington Monthly uses a dollars and cents tabulation to calculate its rankings. WSJ provides a list of colleges as preferred by job recruiters, Kiplinger a list of best value colleges, and Payscale a list of returns to college as an investment. The Alumni Factor surveys college alumni and stresses the career preparation and financial returns of a college. Concurrently, the amount of advertising in college rankings has also increased greatly. In 2003, USNWR ceased having exclusive advertising agreements with specific advertisers (State Farm and then AIG). It now sells advertising to a number of firms such as AXA Equitable, ebay, Wachovia, Dean College, American Express, Col- 9

14 Figure 2: College Rankings Market 2000 to Present lege Loan Corporation, and University of Richmond. Additionally, PR began selling advertisements to an assortment of colleges in a section called School Says. There are sixteen pages of advertising in its 2014 release. The majority of new entrants also coupled their rankings with advertising in the form of banners and pop-ups on their websites. Notably, the type of advertisers buying ad space in college rankings target financiallyconscious people. A large portion of advertisers are financial service providers promoting services such as banking, loans, insurance, credit cards, and investments. Advertisements that are not for financial services such as those for community colleges, employment services, and retail deals are also directed towards financially-conscious people. They seek to target individuals who are concerned about dollars and cents tabulations. Another indication of the increased role of advertising is that many entrants provide their rankings to households for free or low prices. Moreover, these free or cheap rankings coincide with relatively high price tags for advertising space. A page of advertising in USNWR s rankings costs tens of thousands of dollars (estimated $30,000). 10

15 Online advertising for Forbes costs over a hundred dollars. USNWR highlights the popularity of its rankings in the section of its website for advertisers interested in purchasing space. This indicates that advertising is now an important revenue source for ranking firms. That Money Magazine is no longer in the rankings market indicates that an increase in advertising supply by rankings firms did not increase the quantity of advertising. Money was an early producer of value-based rankings. However, it failed to generate enough revenue from advertisers and households to remain in the market. As such, it is likely that an increase in advertising demand led to the increase in rankings quantity, as advertisements in rankings also appear in other media reaching similar consumers (e.g. during various news hours on television). 3 Model Imodelproductchoicebycollegerankingsfirmstofurtherexplorehowchangesin advertising influence the rankings offered and to study the effects of advertising on welfare in the college rankings market. 3.1 Firms and Consumers Consider a college rankings market with two firms that offer rankings products to two types of consumers. Firms 1 and 2 are symmetric and offer rankings (z 1,z 2 ) respectively. The firms choices of rankings vary along a Hotelling line of length 1. The far left point of the line (z =0)representsarankingwiththemaximumemphasis on college value and output. The far right point (z =1)representsarankingwiththe maximum emphasis on non-value factors such as selectivity and college experience. Points inbetween represent some combination of value and other factors. While Hotelling distributes consumers continuously along this line, I locate con- 11

16 sumers at the two endpoints to account for two discrete types of consumers: Type 1 and Type 2. All else equal, Type 1 consumers view products closer to z = 0 or rankings that emphasize college value and output as having higher quality. All else equal, Type 2 consumers view products closer to z =1orrankingsthatemphasize other factors as having higher quality. While consumer types are discrete, consumers willingness to pay for higher quality rankings varies continuously within each consumer type. Thus, at each end point of the Hotelling line, there is a uniformly distributed continuum of consumers y st U[0, 1] where y st reflects the willingness of Type t consumer s to pay for higher quality rankings. Higher values of y st indicate a higher willingness to pay for quality. See Figure 3 for an illustration of this modified Hotelling model. Figure 3: Modified Hotelling Line 12

17 Firm i selects some combination of rankings and price (z i,p ci )inordertomaximize profits. I assume that the marginal cost of producing rankings is zero, as the marginal cost of producing information goods has been understood to be very low (Arrow, 1962). I further assume that fixed costs are sunk in order to focus on the product choices of incumbent firms. Therefore, firm i faces the following profit function when it provides ranking z i at p ci,givenrivalfirmj provides ranking z j at p cj : π i = p ci (q 1i (z i,p ci ; z j,p cj )+q 2i (z i,p ci ; z j,p cj )) q 1i and q 2i represent the quantity of rankings firm i sells to Type 1 and Type 2 consumers respectively for a given (z i,p ci ; z j,p cj ). I model firms as choosing price and product type in a two-stage game. In the first stage, firms simultaneously choose a rankings product (z 1,z 2 )tosell. Inthe second stage, firms observe (z 1,z 2 )choseninthefirststageandsimultaneouslychoose consumer prices (p c1,p c2 ) given these values. Thus, firms maximize profits through sequential games of product choice then price choice. Consumers choose to purchase z 1, z 2,ornorankingsproductbasedonutility maximization. For simplicity and to emphasize horizontal differentiation such that different types of consumers have different preferences over rankings, I assume that each consumer only purchases at most one rankings product. The utility each consumer receives from purchasing no rankings product is normalized to zero, following the tradition in the discrete choice literature of consumer demand. The utility each consumer receives from purchasing z 1 or z 2 varies with consumer type and willingness to pay for rankings quality. Each consumer s of Type 1 receives the following utilities from consuming firm 1 13

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